10: Dante in Limbo: Playing Hope and Fear

10: Dante in Limbo: Playing Hope and Fear

Claudia Rossignoli, @ClauRossignoli, University of St Andrews

The transmediation of medieval literary texts into digital games, particularly of texts that like Dante’s Comedy continue to have a lasting impact on our collective creative imagination, is often motivated by designers’ interest to capitalise on their established cultural appeal and broad popularity. In this sense, Dante’s poem is particularly attractive as it uniquely combines a visible influential presence in the creative industries (through its lively and long-established adaptive tradition) with an eminently ‘playable’ make up (retelling an immersive journey through a complex, multileveled, self-referential cosmic architecture, with a strongly linear narrative and unprecedented world-making ambitions). Most digital games that adapt or refer to the Comedy would use its first section (or cantica), the Inferno, where it is easier to find visual, narrative, structural, and sensorial elements that can satisfy general assumptions about medieval visions of the world and of the afterlife. At the same time, Inferno, more than any other cantica, is characterised by an antagonistic environment and governed by a progressive logic, based on overcoming obstacles and defeating opposition. This makes it highly compatible with the common objective-driven dynamic of play but also easily transferable to the established structures of gameplay in popular gaming genres, as demonstrated by the well-studied case of RPG Dante’s Inferno (EA, 2010). Yet far more interesting creative relationships emerge when we explore connections that are not merely adaptive or referential but rooted in the emotional dimension of our fruition of a representation, a narrative or an experience as readers and/or gamers. Limbo (Playdead, 2010) is a puzzle-solving platformer, with a uniquely atmospheric minimalist design, which at first sight has absolutely nothing mediaeval about it. Its choice of title is intriguing though as there is very little in the game or gameplay that reflects the immobility, dullness and monotony that we would normally associate with this non-place. However, from the outset, all elements of the design clearly aim to deepen the emotive state of being in a blurred and indeterminable place, intensifying the player’s sense of uncertainty, suspension, bewilderment and isolation. As the game progresses, the ghostly environment around the boy-protagonist becomes more threatening and hazardous, as dangers emerge unexpected from the dark contours of the shadowy and mostly achromatic gamescape. The eerie realistic sound increases the tension but also this game world’s disquieting immersive intensity. The boy’s explorative journey originally revisits the structure of classical katabatic narratives, which also inspire Dante’s poem, leading to a momentous but unsettling encounter (with a figure identified by some as the protagonist’s sister) that the player approaches with high expectations of enlightenment and resolution. This event however brings no closure and instead intensifies the initial sense of loss and disorientation, eliminating any remaining hope of ever finding a way out. Limbo is the first circle of Dante’s Hell (Inf. 4), a sombrely sorrowful place, filled with sights anguish and yearning, uniquely devised to house a very particular kind of souls, notably including many children, who are here ‘suspended’ and devoid of all hope, though did not commit any sin. Dante’s limbo (as Limbo’s hostile otherworld) is a place of irreparable loss and permanent dimness, perplexing and morally disorienting, immersed in the bleakness of eternal hopelessness, yet filled with innocent and naïve desire for what can never come.

Dante’s medieval limbo, as its digital counterpart, explores our inability to understand the rules that govern the world we inhabit, our hope of finding the answers we look for as well as our fear of losing sight of our objectives, of following the wrong path and getting irremediably lost in an inescapable hostile wood. Of course, in the moral lucidity of Dante’s poem, limbo and its hopelessness are just a moment of a longer introspective journey that ends in the hight of the heavens, in the brightness of 21

the stars. In the digital, self-contained game world of Limbo the experience never ends, as long as we continue to play, and its desolation remains inescapable. Yet they share a remarkably similar emotional landscape and a mirroring psychological framework, which encourage us to explore experiences of loss and notions of purpose. Reimagining the inner tragedy of this distinctive Dantean realm, Limbo represents a markedly layered instance of Dante’s cultural agency, adapting the text’s emotive substance to a contemporary and dynamic conception, and an intensely immersive experience.

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